Several times, many of them on the mat during aikido classes. I know it's hard to believe that someone as bland and uncontroversial as myself could get into a fight with people as mature and respectful as those who practice aikido (and post on aikido forums), but there you have it. In all of these cases, the way I was attacked was very different in intent, energy, and intensity from the way people attack in standard compliant training. The idea that the compliant attacks seen in most aikido training are in any way honest or sincere is a complete joke.

Instead of attacking with the intention of failing, as most people normally do in aikido, they attacked with intention of succeeding. And these were people who do not train in an art where there is any emphasis on learning how to mount a successful attack against someone trying to prevent it. I think that a person trained in such an art, like boxing, wrestling, or MMA, or even someone who has been in a lot of street fights, would present a much more challenging attack. So I choose to spend my training time working towards handling the most challenging attacks I can while still allowing me to be successful often enough to learn something, rather than training against the least challenging attacks that could theoretically be imagined just so that I can experience successfully performing some fancy techniques over and over again.

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So Giancarlo, what are your qualifications to teach Aikido and Iado. What is your history with real fights? Still waiting for a response.

My qualification to teach is my skill level. I have students who are yudansha and instructors in other forms of Japanese budo. They have been to Japan and/or trained directly with Japanese master-level instructors. They have other teachers who teach and train JSA. They choose to study Iaido with me because they like it and feel that they are learning something worthwhile. Among serious martial artists, this is really the only qualification that counts. Ranks and belts and what-not are just marketing tools to draw in the masses and keep people in line.